Friday, March 20, 2015

Confusion

Perhaps this is some English thing that I've missed and to be fair, I live in Scotland, so the law could well be different.

The situation as it stands seems to be that if I, for instance, passed certain privileged information to a Sun journalist in exchange for a vast cash payment, I would be jailable for several years.

And yet, the journalist who arranged that vast cash payment specifically to entice me into committing what is most definitely a crime would not be, for some unfathomable reason that's clearly far beyond my comprehension, jailable.

I'm very confused here. As far as I can tell, today's judgement - taken with previous ones - seems to indicate that it's illegal to take a massive bribe, but that it's perfectly legal to proffer one, so long as you work for a tabloid newspaper.

I don't understand. How can it be legal to deliberately pay another person very large sums of money to break the law?

"There is no doubt that the verdicts will promote a debate in the media and especially the newspapers, about the wisdom of the Crown Prosecution Service’s decision to prosecute individual journalists rather than to consider corporate charges against the company itself."

Which suggests that it is illegal to offer a bribe to a public servant but that it was the parent company that should have been charged.

I'm not actually holding my breath waiting for that debate in the newspapers nor am I holding my breath waiting for News UK to be charged.